France, you will be happy once you are finally cured of individuals.

One evening in Belleville, a seedy-yet-gentrifying neighborhood (a la Cooper-Young, Memphis folks, but inhabited by a much more disparate melange of French, Arab, Vietnamese, Chinese, African) in the Northeast part of Paris, I wandered into a tight and smoky neighborhood bar, following the sound of sitar music. I sat down to listen to the handful of men, six or so, crowded around a table in a corner of the bar and strumming instruments of various descriptions, exchanging them among each other with ease. I was immediately befriended by a tiny Persian woman who kept fanning herself with the hem of her heavy sweater, apologizing in a husky sigh – Fatih. And her friend, Lise, a Parisian lawyer with hair pulled straight back from her face, all in black and emanating the impression that she'd dallied in nonsense perhaps once in her life and never intended to repeat the experience. Both of them - and indeed everyone - chainsmoked with an enthusiasm rivaling that of the girls on the patio at the One More a Memphis, and for no reason that I could pinpoint, they kept buying me Kir mure, a cocktail of white wine and blackberry liquer that nobody drinks in America. Fatih told me all about how she loved America (one of the lies Parisians continually repeat: the other two most prominent are "You are so beautiful," and "No, no - you speak very well French!"), and how she wanted to travel more but couldn't because her adult daughter, who also lives in Paris, was ... and here she would break off, purse her lips, and scramble her delicate fingers beside her temple. Fatih decided that I needed to learn to dance to Arab music, so she pulled me out of my chair tout de suite and made me wiggle my hips and shrug my shoulders ("Laike zhees ... sensual ... oui, oui ... NON. Noht laike zhat." And then she'd grab me and move me like a clunky American doll until I copied her to her satisfaction). Things ended up with fringed scarves being magically produced from behind the bar, a woman appearing like a snag-toothed and aged Salome all in flowing black and taut headscarf who turned out to be a professional dancer, the evidently pregnant barmaid essaying from behind the bar, and Fatih and I dancing with all of them in a circle, palms slapping against each other to the ever-faster whirl of the sitars, guitars, and who knew what else.

On the train to Toulouse from Paris the next day, I succumbed to cabin fever and wandered through the train into the observation car. (NB: difficult to observe much on these high-speed trains. All the herds of cows and sheep and quaint little stone farms huddled against petit French gardens, and picturesque villages tucked into the Bordeaux countryside are things you know are there but can't really see much of besides a green, yellow, and grey blur.) I spent the next few hours locked in conversation with my umpteenth Jaded Parisian, Patric, a man with cropped grey hair, jeans, a black wool sweater, a Robert Redford five-o'clock shadow, and a penchant for referring to America as "your beautiful country," in just the tone you're imagining. He also dubbed George Bush "your esteemed president." He shared with me the growing concern in France about genetically modified food, and how the French fear that American companies are slipping horemone-treated meat; in particular, into the French markets underhandedly. The French take food quite seriously; a tone that becomes understandable in a country that gets two hours for lunch each day, and where dinner often encompasses three.

Kharim, the bike-happy world traveller I mentioned in another post and who reminds me faintly of my friend Kirill, has moved on to ... somewhere else (one is never sure, especially when one is me), but he bequeathed to the little American girl beaucoup de Portuguese music and French slang. (It's true: I speak French like a grammar professor. It's ridiculously unhip. But not uncharacteristic, at least for me.) I'd come home from school to find him slouching in the garden, his lean and rangy legs stretched out and bare toes buried in the grass, cradling his little Brazilian backpacker's guitar like a peculiarly tiny infant, like those sandstone paintings of Kokopelli the flute player. Strumming away and crooning to himself. He'd look up and hail me, Ah, Avie; Salut! fingers still poised over the strings. And he'd pull a chair up next to him and tell me stories about himself, about everything he's certain of, which is everything he thinks. He believes it's wrong to travel to poorer countries unless you're going there deliberately for humanitarian purposes, and even then he thinks you have to consciously try not to be exploitative. He also has a personal rule not to travel anywhere that he can't reach on his bicycle. So he's never seen America; he loves everything Brazilian but won't go there. He made an exception to travel to Vietnam, but he says he never will again, because it didn't feel right.

Trouver d'abord, chercher apres. Find first, search after. - Jean Cocteau

He loved to talk to me about Bob Dylan but admitted that he had no idea what any of the lyrics meant. That's as astonishing as anything I've encountered here, eh?